Knightley Charts Her Own Course

At 19, Actress Has Her Pick Of Films, Is Alert To The Pitfalls Of Celebrity

March 06, 2005|By RON DICKER; Special to The Courant

Keira Knightley, who turns 20 at the end of this month, has already made the A list. She has the freedom to choose her scripts. She floats between indies and blockbusters on a cloud of goodwill.

Knightley -- star of ``Love Actually,'' ``Pirates of the Caribbean'' and now ``The Jacket'' -- asked for an agent at age 3. She is technically not an overnight success.

She relishes the turn her life has taken. This IS what she always wanted. She just doesn't want it too much.

``You try and protect it. You'll put yourself into a hole in exactly the same movie over and over, or you'll screw it up some other way,'' she says in a recent interview.

Knightley wears a shag that is her signature hairdo for a recent run of magazine covers and awards shows. It's a mod-girl look that fits this committed Londoner. She recently bought a flat there. A stint in Los Angeles to shoot ``Domino,'' in which she plays a supermodel turned bounty hunter, convinced her that all that glitters in Tinseltown is not home.

``I like L.A.; I hate L.A.,'' she says. ``I am scared by it, very scared by it. I think, coming from London, ... it's difficult going to L.A. It's so spread out, and I don't drive, and you can't walk, and I have to rely on other people driving me places, which I hate because I have a big thing about independence.''

She's going places anyway. She already signed to act in two more ``Pirates of the Caribbean'' adventures. She recently completed a new version of ``Pride and Prejudice'' back in England and is now hoping to tantalize moviegoers with her first role playing an American in ``The Jacket,'' which opened Friday. Knightley plays a lost soul in Vermont who meets up with a Desert Storm veteran (Adrien Brody) and finds their relationship may be the key to healing her life and saving his.

``The Jacket'' is either time travel or mind travel, depending on one's perspective. After a few viewings, Knightley can see it both ways.

The premise is this: Frequent doses of drugs and straitjacketed stays in a mental hospital's isolation vault lead Brody's Jack to visions that he will die in four days. Knightley's Jackie, a detached product of abuse, also is headed for tragedy.

Knightley read 10 scripts over a rainy weekend in Dublin and this one ``jumped.'' She says she has hand-picked her last three screenplays, after sparking her career as a boyish soccer player in the indie delight ``Bend It Like Beckham'' and then as the imperiled governor's daughter in ``Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.''

It is not supposed to happen this way, especially when you're British. No one, including Kate Winslet, Kate Beckinsale and even Americans who like to speak with British accents, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, got to have this full a say in their cinematic destinies so early. Knightley is the anti-stay-in-school poster child, having dropped out at age 16.

``Obviously I want to choose what I want to do,'' she says, ``and I think all of us at some point want to be at the top of our profession, or try. I want to be an actress, which isn't the same thing as wanting to be a movie star.''

During this chat in a Park City, Utah, restaurant during the Sundance Film Festival, paparazzi gather at the window. She has said that photographers remind her of ``The Birds,'' the Hitchcockian nightmare in which birds multiply both in number and ferocity.

Her blossoming celebrity has invited proportionate tabloid attention. That rates high on her ``ick'' scale. This was not part of what she envisioned when she was watching her parents, actor Will Knightley and actress/author Sharman Macdonald, perform. They did their jobs and got to go home without fuss.

``I don't buy ... that you sign an invisible contract as soon as you go into a public profession that you don't have a private life,'' she says. ``I think it's cool talking about constants like your mom and dad; I don't think that at 19 you should talk about something that isn't a total constant.''

Rumors swirled around Brody and Knightley while they shot ``The Jacket'' in Scotland, and they were chummy at the premiere. But she has mostly been on/off with an Irish model named Jamie Dornan.

Acting is the one constant. Her parents let her perform during summers as a child, and at 9 she landed her first prime stage part, in Moira Armstrong's ``A Village Affair'' (1994). Determined to avoid British soap operas, she entered filmdom's big time as the decoy to Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala in ``Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace (1999).''

``The Jacket'' gave Knightley a chance to use her first American accent, as a working-class New Englander. It was difficult to maintain, however, because of the Scottish location and the presence of her family.

``You play a character with your own voice and it's still kind of you in a weird way, but suddenly you take the voice away and you invent,'' she says. ``The character isn't you anymore. There aren't any boundaries.''

For Knightley at this point, it's more important that she not perceive any boundaries.

``You just have to keep striving, no matter what the audience thinks,'' she says. ``Hopefully you'll find a different audience ... who will appreciate the film for any number of reasons.''